Remember going to this, with Rod Quantock as the host. All the bands were great- but whoever thought of putting on a breakdance troop between the sets would be a good idea…………
I can still see Rod coming out and chastising the crowd for covering the dancers with a deluge of cans/rubbish/whatever they could throw at them. They came out between Dear Enemy and the Divinyls I think, and the change in tone was just too much for some in the crowd.
Still, I genuinely feel I was blessed to grow up in such a fabulous era of Australian music, where you could see genuinely world class bands without taking on a mortgage.
I have recently met someone with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and they’re following the same Australian clinical trial course as Peter Moulding , one of very very few examples of pancreatic cancer going into remission worldwide. Early signs are positive , but there’s a lot to play out and full recovery is exceedingly unlikely. But now not impossible.
I’ve tried searching many gig databases, but I can’t find an early Oils concert that I went to in the very early 80s. It was in a big white tent on the area that Rod Laver Arena is now on. Any ideas on date? It was a daytime gig.
Back in the day though even the overseas groups like the Stones, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin etc were cheap enough. Chisel, Dragon, INXS, Oils etc were all free at a Pub near you !
A good friend of mine was stationed at the naval base in Woolloomooloo, Sydney in the late 80’s/early 90’s (the same guy who missed the Kooyong show through being arrested). I was never lucky enough to, but he caught Midnight Oil on a handful of occasions playing unannounced warm-up gigs (played pseudonymously) at pubs in Coogee Bay and The Rocks. A couple of hundred punters crammed into small, sweaty bars where the band would be rough and ready, road-testing their sets and/or playing older material.
That’s when you see big name bands at their most primal - not the well-oiled machines in their stadium shows.
